POETRY IN MOTION PART 2

"Patterns of imagery... are oracular in origin, and derive from the epiphanic moment, the flash of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time, the importance of which is indicated by Cassirer in MYTH AND LANGUAGE."

To recap: in the POETICS Aristotle takes the very concrete aspects of music and dance-- rhythm from both, harmony only from music, and links them with the somewhat more abstract actitivies of making representations of the real world through writing and art. Both activities he files under a greater abstraction, "mimesis."

In the section of Frye's ARCHETYPES essay already examined, Frye takes the concrete organic activity of "rhythm" and relates it to the ongoing narrative found in a work of literature (keeping in mind that Frye was concerned only with print literature, whether in its prosaic or poetic forms). The representational activity of narrative, which seems to be more abstract in Aristotle, becomes more concrete in Frye as he relates narrative to comparable organic actitivies, such as the "synchronization" of animals to their environment. Narrative thus becomes the aspect of literature which moves in time and hence is akin to "rhythm."

In the quote above, Frye then examines the aspect of literature which moves in space. For this aspect he draws on Cassirer's notion that the fantastic images found in archaic myth are not primarily meant to reproduce reality but to reproduce the image-maker's emotional response to reality, his "instantaneous comprehension" of a "total pattern." His only example in this essay is that of the Yeats poem, "Sailing to Byzantium," in which Frye sees the poet's vision worked out by a pattern of images that reinforce the emotional tone: "the city, the tree, the bird, the community of sages, the geometrical gyre and the detachment from the cyclic world." (The last item on his list sounds more like a theme than an image, for which perhaps Yeats' gyre was the objective correlative.)

Of course, one objection to this might be that, no matter how much images may be constructed into a given literary pattern, they have temporal aspects both within and beyond the text they occupy, just as narrative has its spatial aspects both within and beyond the text. And even though Frye is speaking of images as belonging to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, it still seems odd to speak of spatially-oriented images-- which in the real world denote *things* certainly more concrete than either rhythm or harmony-- and line up such images with the aspect of literature that is implicitly more abstract than narrative: "what [the writer] means."

In addition, though I believe Cassirer is at least partially right about the formative process of archaic myth, one cannot discount that in archaic times as in our own many patterns may not necessarily be produced from the mind of one gifted seer, be he William Butler Yeats or the uncredited author of THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH. Many such patterns are passed through literature not purely in response to insights gleaned from a single artist's "epiphanic moment" but because said patterns work as pure narrative, and so they get used by many, many artists-- some of whom may experience epiphanies that allow them to develop the pattern in significant new ways.

None of this analysis is intended to imply that Frye's fundamental insight is wrong as such. As he himself says, arts that move in time have spatial aspects, and those that move in space have temporal aspects. Thus one should probably expect considerable interfusion between these categories even when Frye himself attempts to schematize those arts according to what he considers the narrative "body" and the meaning-fraught "mind."

One more section and I'm done with both motion and still lifes for now.